Festschrifts form a longstanding academic tradition to bid farewell to a colleague or professor who has made a significant contribution to his or her field of study. Keeping it secret as long as possible for the one who is being celebrated is part of that tradition. I am convinced that this ‘conspiracy’ will come as a big surprise to Bernard Aikema. Firstly, because this issue of A&H consists of articles and essays written by either budding or already well-established scholars who were all or still are students of his. Secondly, although he will feel deeply honored and touched, it may slightly unsettle him since it anticipates his imminent retirement in approximately a year: A moment he is absolutely dreading! One of the additional attractions of his appointment of chiara fama in Italy, at the University of Verona, was the difference in retirement age between the Netherlands and Italy. Initially 72, now 70, these extra years were for him a precious and welcome extension to the Dutch retirement age of 65. This Festschrift pays an eloquent tribute to his lifelong love and passion for teaching, and his dedication to his students.

An initiative like this inevitably misses out on former students who would have loved to contribute, but lacked for one reason or another the time or the opportunity to do so. To trace and track down all the students in the different cities where Bernard taught or is teaching: Nijmegen in the Netherlands, Louvain in Belgium and Verona in Italy, was in and by itself already quite an enterprise. All my praises go to the two editors of this volume, Carlo Corsato and Juliette Ferdinand, who lovingly took it upon them to initiate this enterprise and scout for the students as well as a publisher. The variety and broadness of Bernard’s research that he also brought into the classroom are tellingly echoed in the diversity in topics, scope and approach of the contributions of his students.

When Carlo and Juliette approached me with the request to write an opening remark, I thought: why not? I am after all his very first student, attending a seminar of his in 1975 –Bernard Aikema being a very young professor in his first year at Nijmegen University – on the Venetian Renaissance. And, as a student majoring in art history I was required to participate in a three-week excursion to Florence: I instantly fell in love with Italy. Little did I know then, that I would spend my life sharing this love and passion for Italy and Italian art with that young professor of Venetian art who would become my lifelong companion.

Introduction (Carlo Corsato and Juliette Ferdinand) (pp. 11–13)

Introduction

The first idea for this volume came up in 2016. Bernard was away on one of his research trips – not for nothing is he nicknamed ‘the flying Dutchman’ – when a few of his former PhD students assembled in his office at the University of Verona. What started as a simple chat and a cosy get-together reminiscing about all those years of research under Bernard’s supervision developed into a kind of premature nostalgia, as though his imminent retirement had already removed not only his name from the office door, but also his legacy. To all of us who felt privileged to have been given the opportunity to study and work with him, came the spontaneous idea to continue his legacy by paying tribute to the man and the teacher in the best possible way: by writing about art in his honour.

This harking back with fondness to the many years we spent with Bernard quickly prompted us to transform our enthusiasm into a serious commitment and a concrete plan of action. We happily took the lead, and, as Prof. Józef Grabski generously supported the project from the beginning, we could start involving our colleagues and friends in the enterprise. All Bernard’s former and current PhD students were invited to submit a paper to this Festschrift. The response was hugely positive and we are very grateful to everyone for the enthusiasm and encouragement that they brought to the project. We are sorry that some have not been able to contribute for one reason or another. To those who were able to respond positively to our invitation goes our gratitude: the high quality of scholarship of the papers speaks for itself, and should make Bernard proud in the knowledge that all the contributors were students of his, either in the Netherlands, Belgium, or Italy.

To everybody who knows Bernard well, and his passion for art history, it will not come as a big surprise to notice the breadth of the topics, artists, periods, and methods discussed in this volume. His expertise ranges from Italian, especially Venetian art, to Flemish and German painting, and his field of interests includes, among many others, iconography, art collecting, cultural studies, and the geography of art. All these aspects are fully investigated in this volume, and they made our editorial work as interesting as it was challenging. In fact, having assembled our crew, we now needed a map for what promised to be a sort of pictorial navigation – to cite the title of Marco Boschini’s Carta del navegar pittoresco. Our two-year-long ‘navigation’ was not at all easy, as it forced us into a mental journey across the Alps, from Flanders to Italy and back, as well as travel through time, from the fourteenth to the end of the eighteenth century. The structure we eventually chose should be used in a flexible way: sections, in fact, are not meant to represent disciplinary barriers – something we and Bernard never believed in – but should rather aid in grouping the contributions around themes and works of art so as to promote multi- and cross-disciplinary research.

In the first section, ‘Image and Meaning’, Denise Zaru analyses how mnemotechnical practices, described in fifteenth-century sources, may help understand the representation of architecture in Venetian altarpieces of the period. Arvi Wattel provides a political interpretation of the ceiling painted by Garofalo in the palace of Antonio Costabili, one of the most prominent citizens of Renaissance Ferrara. Bram de Klerck investigates Fra Bartolommeo’s landscapes and reveals, behind the depiction of natural details, hidden symbolism rooted in theology and devotion. Erlend De Groot proves that, despite their mediocre artistic qualities and lack of any traces of beauty, the Giant Radish and the Still Life with Pig’s Head in the Rijksmuseum can be fully appreciated as visual historical documents.

In the second section, ‘North and South’, Isabella di Lenardo describes the connection between the Flemish mercantile community in late Renaissance Venice and the shaping of new pictorial genres. Andrea Leonardi explores the North-South relationship within the Italian peninsula and documents the interest in collecting Venetian art in Apulia and the Genoese Republic. Maria Forcellino describes Johan Meerman’s Grand Tour to Venice and presents a few excerpts of his fascinating and unpublished travel journal.

In the third section ‘Image and Artistic Creativity’, Carlo Corsato offers a detailed study of the Louvre Crucifixion by Paolo Veronese and provides a new visual reconstruction of this peculiar composition. Thomas Dalla Costacompares drawings by Jacopo Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, and explains their respective techniques and workshop practices. Francesca Cocchiara sheds new light on the activity of Giulio Carpioni and Francesco Ruschi, two often neglected, yet fascinating seventeenth-century peintres-graveurs.

In the fourth section,‘Word and Image’, Juliette Ferdinand tackles the debate around the legitimacy of art during the Wars of Religion through a thorough analysis of the introduction to the French translation of Albrecht Dürer’s Four Books on Human Proportion by Louis Meigret. Andrea Polati studies the (lost?) Allegory of Human Life, attributed to Giorgione by Carlo Ridolfi, as well as the Cassinelli collection through the accurate analysis of archival documentation and primary sources. Last but not least, Adriano Aymonino fully reconstructs the critical reception of Lodovico Dolce’s Dialogo della pittura, intitolato l’Aretinoand its crucial role in the theoretical foundation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century classicism.

A quick look at Bernard’s list of publications, included at the end of this volume, will suffice to appreciate how all these papers are intimately linked to his very own research activity. In a certain sense, we may say that these contributions and their authors are like his children and, as every good father does, he should be proud and pleased to see how they have become adult and independent.

There are scholars that do not enjoy receiving Festschrifts, as these may be received as morbid anticipations of future obituaries. We, however, are pretty much convinced that Bernard will treasure this volume as much as we will never forget what we have learnt from him.

‘Marvellous Imitations and Outrageous Parodies. Pietro della Vecchia revisited’, in Continuity, Innovation, and Connoisseurship. Old Master Paintings at the Palmer Museum of Art. Proceedings of an International Symposium held at the Palmer Museum of Art on March 31 through April 2, 1995, ed. by M. J. Harris, University Park, 2003, pp. 110–133

This essay investigates the representation of architecture in Venetian painting, focusing on the use of fictive buildings in altarpieces around 1500. The analysis of paintings of Giovanni Bellini, Cima da Conegliano and Marco Basaiti demonstrates their crucial role in the creation of an ambiguous pictorial space. It shows how the use of a metonymic architectural vocabulary participates to the creation and the meaning of the so-called typology of the Sacra conversazione. In these altarpieces, the architecture is represented as an architectural frame imitating a real chapel and blurring the distinction between the pictorial and real space. The fictive buildings are rhetorical topoi that transform the pictorial space into a mental and devotional space, operating as metaphors of meditative activity; they are also the privileged support to convey a metaphorical discourse about the Virgin.

The essay proposes to identify the roots of the metaphorical use of architecture in Italian devotional painting in mnemotechnical practices described in treatises on memory, which were widely disseminated at the end of the fifteenth century, and their applications to meditative practices promoted by Mendicant Orders. It also sheds light on the role in their dissemination played by the Observance movement of Mendicant Orders and by the architectural metaphors used in their devotional treatises.

Good Vibrations. Mutual Love in Garofalo’s Frescoes for Antonio Costabili

In the first decade of the sixteenth century, Garofalo painted the ceiling of a small room in a palace that belonged to one of Renaissance Ferrara’s most prominent citizens, its chief magistrate Antonio Costabili. Despite being one of the most widely studied works in Garofalo’s œuvre, the so-called Sala del Tesoro remains not very well understood. This article argues that the grisailles in the lunettes – depicting the story of Eros and his brother Anteros, the god of mutual love – are key to reading the animated balcony scene on the ceiling as a world ruled by Anteros, where (unlikely) opposites are harmoniously united. Garofalo’s decorations cast Antonio Costabili as a second Anteros and underscore the essential role of Costabili in the successful governing of Ferrara.

BRAM DE KLERCK - Fra Bartolommeo: the Depiction of Landscape and the Use of Devotional Images (pp. 59–73)

Fra Bartolommeo: the Depiction of Landscape and the Use of Devotional Images

In a discussion of Fra Bartolommeo’s God the Father altarpiece in Museo Villa Guinigi, Lucca, Madonna and Child with Saints in Besançon Cathedral, and Salvator Mundiin Galleria Palatina, Florence, it is argued that the depictions of small landscapes in the backgrounds of these paintings confront the devout beholder with the notions of the sinful world, the innocence of pagan peoples not yet converted, and the promise of religious salvation, respectively. A fourth case, the Annunciation in Volterra Cathedral, is characterised by an ingenious inversion of the painted realm as opposed to the real world. Observation of the background landscape forces the viewer to imagine himself to occupy a privileged position inside of the Virgin Mary’s dwellings.

ERLEND DE GROOT - Unappealing Paintings, Great Stories: Two Still Lifes from the Kitchen of the Muiderslot (pp. 75–82)

Unappealing Paintings, Great Stories: Two Still Lifes from the Kitchen of the Muiderslot

This article offers interpretations of two seventeenth-century food still lifes kept at Muiden castle. Neither painting is really about food. In one case its meaning is related to ambitious building plans and hopes of a bright future by a community of exiles from the Netherlands in Germany. In the other case its meaning is related to forgotten proverbs and sayings. Both cases make clear that even the most insignificant works of art can have great stories to tell.

«Een Italische Keucken van Dirick de Vriese». The Commercialisation of the Artistic Identity between Venice and the ‘North’

In the second half of the sixteenth century the artistic exchanges between Venice and the Low Countries intensified. Although no Venetian painters settled in Antwerp or in the cities of the Low Countries, several painters of Flemish origin, in particular Dirck de Vries and Ludovico Pozzoserrato, moved to Venice. These two personalities fostered the circulation in Venice of paintings produced in Flanders and, in the meantime, produced paintings featuring some subjects characterized by a marked Venetian identity. The essay examines in particular the subjects of Kitchens, domestic interiors with various characterizations, and the Carnival, another subject matter peculiar of the lagoon, which was exported and spread rapidly to the North. The presence in the collections of wealthy Antwerp merchants of these subjects, codified as ‘Venetian’, even though produced by artists of Flemish origin, is an important element defining the perception of this production identified as a ‘Venetianity’ and carefully managed by foreign artists.

Genoese Noblemen in the Kingdom of Naples: Michele IV Imperiale (1719–1782), Prince of Francavilla, between the Taste for Antique and Venetian Art

The Orazione di rendimento di grazie al re, written by Bernardo della Torre (1779) on the occassion of the foundation of the Reale Accademia delle Scienze e delle Belle Lettere in Naples, during the reign of Ferdinando di Borbone, is dedicated to Michele IV Imperiale (1719–1782), prince of Francavilla. It opens the present paper on the artistic relations between the region of Apulia and the Genoese Republic, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, through the Neapolitan hub and with a constant interest for patronage and collecting. Michele Imperiale, a Genoese settled in Naples, but honoured by Apulian aristocracy with a noble title (prince of Francavilla), rented the Cellamare palace which housed a version of the Supper in the House of Simon Pharisee by Veronese, derived from the painting executed for the Santi Nazario e Celso monastery in Verona (1556), later documented in the Balbi-Durazzo palace in Genoa (1737). Imperiale’s strategies were similar to those of other Genoese noblemen (Giustiniani, Doria, De Mari) active in the Kingdom of Naples.

In 1775 Johan Meerman (1753–1815) undertook a Grand Tour of Italy. On the way back to Holland, he set out from Naples, then considered by Grand Tourists as the southernmost stop on their journey, and travelled north through Florence, Bologna and Ferrara. In the spring of 1776 Meerman concluded his itinerary in Venice, by exploring the city and all its famous buildings, churches and art collections. Moreover he witnessed the feast of the Ascension (or Sensa), one of the most famous celebrations in the city, eagerly anticipated by citizens and travellers alike.

The essay analyses the Louvre Crucifixion by Paolo Veronese (c. 1575–1580) and aims to clarify the presence and significance of the woman cloaked in yellow in the middle of the composition. Alternatively identified with the personification of the Synagogue, Mary Magdalen, or one of the three Marys, the veiled figure recurred frequently in representations of different moments of the Passion of Christ from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, including a number of works by Veronese himself. A study of this visual tradition explains how Veronese arranged the Louvre composition to be observed from a specific viewing angle. When contemplated from the right-hand side, the image reveals how the woman robed in yellow, none other than one of the Marys, has the function of guiding viewers through a spiritual journey from the suffering of the Virgin to the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross.

Drawings and Draughtsmanship in Sixteenth-Century Venice: Tintoretto and Veronese in Comparison

Jacopo Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese were two of the most prolific draughtsmen of Renaissance Venice, as testified by the relevant number of surviving drawings attributed to them. The black chalk, occasionally heightened with white, had been Tintoretto’s preferred medium, whereas Veronese always preferred pen and ink. Moreover, drawings of the latter belonged to different categories (sketches, studies of figures, chiaroscuro drawings), while Tintoretto drew chiefly single figure studies. The reason behind these differences should be sought in the use these artists made of drawings: Tintoretto used it exclusively as a vehicle in his progress towards the finished painting and not as an intellectual tool, as Veronese did. It is well known that Tintoretto and Veronese had reciprocally studied themselves, but their approach to drawing has never been compared before. Highlighting the differences of their corpus graphicum, this article aims to compare the drawing practice inside Tintoretto and Veronese’s workshops and their working methods.

Giulio Carpioni and Francesco Ruschi’s Links with Vicenza through the Engravings by Giovanni Georgi and Giacomo Ruffoni

The present paper sheds new light on the activity of the peintre-graveurs Giulio Carpioni and Francesco Ruschi, overlooked in recent scholarly literature. From 1630 Carpioni worked as book illustrator in collaboration with publishers (e.g. Giacomo Amadio), cartographers (e.g. Pietro Michieli) and engravers, particularly Giovanni Georgi. To Georgi was also connected Ruschi on at least one occasion, but the painter collaborated more extensively with the pupil of Georgi, Giacomo Ruffoni, originally from Trento and active as both illustrator and engraver. In 1653 Ruffoni, for example, made a print after Ruschi’s Saint John the Evangelist, formerly in the church of the Reformed Franciscans in Vicenza and now lost. The connection between the two illustrators and their links with the cultural and publishing network, with particular emphasis on the involvement of Carpioni and Ruschi, offer a new insight and understanding of the artistic and cultural context of seventeenth-century Vicenza.

JULIETTE FERDINAND - The French Translation of Albrecht Dürer’s Four Books on Human Proportion: a ‘crime de lèse majesté divine’? (pp. 171–184)

The French Translation of Albrecht Dürer’s Four Books on Human Proportion: a ‘crime de lèse majesté divine’?

In 1557 Louis Meigret (c. 1500 – c. 1558), a humanist and grammarian from Lyon, published a French translation of Albrecht Dürer’s treatise Vier Bücher von Menschlicher Proportion (Nuremberg, 1528) as Les quatre livres d’Albert Durer, peinctre & geometrien tres excellent, de la proportion des parties & pourtraicts des corps humains (Paris: chez Charles Périer). In thepreface to the reader, Meigret brings up the polemic launched by the Reformed theologians regarding the function of art and the representation of divinity. These two pages attest to the livelinessof the debate on the legitimacy of representing not only religious scenes, but also the human body, a few years before the outbreak of the first of the Wars of Religion in France. The present contribution sets out to analyse the text to gain a better understanding of what is at stake in the light of the religious context, especially in Meigret’s circle, thanks to a comparison with the positions adopted by the two most influential theologians of the time, Martin Luther (1483–1546) and Jean Calvin (1509–1564).

An Impossible Giorgione: The Allegory of Human Life and the Cassinelli Collection in Genoa

The present essay deals with the Allegory of Human Life (‘Simbolo dell’humana vita’), attributed to Giorgione in Carlo Ridolfi’s Le maraviglie dell’arte (1648). Particular attention has been paid to both literary and visual sources of this iconography, widely diffused in seventeenth-century Venice by Pietro della Vecchia. According to Ridolfi, this painting, allegedly by Giorgione, was owned by the hitherto unknown ‘Signori Cassinelli’ in Genoa. Unpublished documents have helped to determine the identity of Bartolomeo Cassinelli, a Genoese merchant who worked as agent for the Widmann company in Venice from 1633 to 1644. Among these documents there emerges an interesting inventory of Cassinelli’s collection which included a ‘quadro con la contemplatione della vita humana’: the same allegory attributed to Giorgione. Carlo Ridolfi’s detailed description offers also the opportunity to identify a painting by Vecchia that has recently appeared on the art market. Is it a copy after the lost original by Giorgione or a fake? These new findings shed new light on the invention of the Giorgione myth and the reception of his works in Seicento Venice, especially in the milieu of Ridolfi.

ADRIANO AYMONINO - Ludovico Dolce’s Aretino: Its Foundational Role in the Theory of Classicism and its Eighteenth-Century Revival (pp. 201–218)

Ludovico Dolce’s Aretino: Its Foundational Role in the Theory of Classicism and its Eighteenth-Century Revival

In its criticism of Michelangelo’s late production and reverence for Raphael and the Antique, Ludovico Dolce’s Aretino (1557) provided a few founding principles that would be fully developed by the classicist theory of art in the following centuries. Frequently discussed in academic circles during the seventeenth century, Dolce’s polemical dialogue was eventually reprinted in French and Italian in 1735 with a preface by Nicolas Vleughels, director of the French Academy in Rome, who drastically reformed the institution, laying the ground for the spread of the neo-classical aesthetic in the second half of the century. This essay will discuss the seminal role of Dolce’s Aretino in the formulation of a classicist theory of art and its impact on eighteenth-century art theory and academic practices.

The text providing the basis of this article has so far never been connected with Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari. It shows how a Florentine humanist scholar, Piero Vettori, understood this masterpiece in the middle of the sixteenth century, and from it threads develop leading to a better understanding of both its grandiose composition, and eventually, its inglorious end. It is suggested that Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari was conceived of and intended to be executed as a ‘Greek’ painting in Florence, ‘the new Athens’, and precisely for this very reason deteriorated so quickly.

Savoldo’s Saint Matthew and the Angel: Problems of Iconography and Interpretation

The two background scenes in Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo’s Saint Matthew and the Angel, currently in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, have been the subject of scholarly debate. This paper presents a new identification for one of the scenes, linking it to an incident in the apocryphal Acts and Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, and further suggests that the other background scene contains either a direct or indirect reference to a passage in Matthew’s account of the Olivet discourse. Furthermore, the composition of the painting has been examined to argue that the painting presents, albeit obliquely, Matthew’s transition from the world of sin and business to that of faith and redemption. The traditional connection of the work to Milanese economic reform and the activities of the Milanese mint, in which the work was originally found, has been challenged, and a new interpretation has been presented that foregrounds issues of charity both in the painting and in Milan at the time the work was made.

Beyond the Binary: Michelangelo, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri and a Drawing at Windsor Castle

Michelangelo created some of the most beautiful drawings of the Italian Renaissance for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, a young Roman nobleman whom he met in 1532. Many of these drawings are well identified, but scholars have long debated which, if any, extant examples might be those mentioned by Vasari as idealized heads Michelangelo presented to Tommaso intended, at least in part, to help the young man learn to draw. Present attributions elicit considerable interpretive and stylistic challenges, especially in determining what Michelangelo might have meant to express with these images. This study takes a fresh look at one of the most controversial of these proposed attributions, the recto and verso of a sheet from the Royal Collection in Windsor Castle (RL 12764). Notable scholarly ambivalence concerns whether the so-called recto is male or female. We argue that the drawing is better understood by looking past binary distinctions of gender, in much the same way Michelangelo thought about Tommaso. The paper features a new identification of the helmet worn by the figure, which helps clarify Michelangelo’s intent. Finally, the paper reinforces how Michelangelo used drawings as opportunities for conversation, enabling a suggestive rather than literal form of communication between master and pupil, friend and friend, admirer and beloved.

A Chimerical Procession: Invention, Emulation, and the Language of Witchcraft in Lo stregozzo

Lo stregozzo (1520s), the first Italian engraving dedicated to witchcraft, has been studied in terms of attribution, iconography, textual and visual sources, and in relation to early modern witch beliefs. An associational and metaphoric reading opens new possibilities for contextualizing the print. The chimera and the hovering man beneath the witch are deployed as a means of thinking about the early modern conception of witchcraft and the artistic process of creating this print. In one sense, they define witchcraft as a subverted world governed by inversion, heresy, and monstrosity, and in another, they raise theoretical and practical problems concerning artistic imitation and invention.

MARILYN ARONBERG LAVIN - A Faun in Love: The Bernini Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (pp. 297–323)

A Faun in Love: The Bernini Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The author of the Carrara marble group of a faun, a fig tree, three babies, and a panther in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has been variously identified – from by Pietro Bernini and Gianlorenzo together, to conceived by Pietro but carved by Gianlorenzo, to all by Gianlorenzo – and is probably a combination of all three. Its date is surely c. 1616, a time when father and son were working closely together. We know it was beloved by Gianlorenzo for he kept it throughout his adult life always visible, installed on the turning of the staircase that led from the pian terreno to the piano nobile of his house on the Via della Mercede in Rome.

The subject has just as often been debated: named il Fauno molestato dai Putti, it is cited as a teasing incident with one little boy pushing back the faun’s head and the other sticking his tongue out at him. Another, more classical interpretation of the group is as an image of Virgil’s dictum ‘Love Conquers All’. Still a third idea is that the statue was meant as a confrontation to ancient art, in the manner of Michelangelo, to show off the superior technical skill of the modern artist. My interpretation is less metaphorical, more physical than these: it depends on the observation that the obstreperous position of the faun’s raised left leg is part of a long tradition of representing extreme love making. Further, I purport that, he, the faun, is locked in a position of eternal coitus with a beguiling female spirit in the tree. For this reason I call the group ‘A Faun in Love’.

MAREK WALCZAK - Between the Eternal City and Cracow. On the Origins of the Iconography of Saint Hyacinth of Poland OP (d. 1257) (pp. 325–357)

Between the Eternal City and Cracow. On the Origins of the Iconography of Saint Hyacinth of Poland OP

The oldest representation of the Polish Dominican friar, Hyacinth Odrowąż, canonised in Rome in 1594, is a Late Gothic panel painting from around 1500, originally in the church of the Blackfriars in Cracow and since 1666 kept in the parish church at Odrowąż in Lesser Poland, from where the family of the saint is believed to have originated. The painting shows Saint Hyacinth kneeling before a vision of the Virgin, following a description of a miracle in the oldest Life of the saint written by his fellow Dominican from the Cracow convent, friar Stanislaus (1371 – c. 1385/1392). This composition was used in the propagation of the cult of the newly canonised saint and became a source of a generally accepted iconographic type of his representations. A key role in this process was played by the canonisation ceremony in which a banner with a Vision of Saint Hyacinth held a prominent place. The theatrum canonizationis was depicted by Federico Zuccaro in wall paintings (1600) decorating a chapel founded by Cardinal Girolamo Bernerio da Correggio at the church of S. Sabina on the Aventine. The banner represented there was later transported to Cracow where it has survived to this day in the Dominican church. Works of art that originated immediately after the canonisation, especially prints which faithfully reproduce the Vision of Saint Hyacinth, allow to closely follow the development of the iconography of the new saint and the process of the Odrowąż painting acquiring the status of the vera effigies, or true likeness, of Saint Hyacinth.